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Monday, August 15, 2011

AwayFind is a Personal Assistant App for Busy Email Inboxes


AwayFind. Check email every 5 minutes? AwayFind eliminates the need to constantly check your email by alerting you of truly urgent messages.
Price: Free App, Free Service, Service Upgrades Start at $15/mo.
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros
An email personal assistant to send you emails you deem important.The service itself supports flagging important messages to send via email client, text, phone, and more options.Flagged messages easily accessible from notification window shade.Another way to access your AwayFind account.Very responsive developers.
Cons
You can only monitor one email address on a free account.
I’ve used AwayFind off and on for the last several years, so I’ve been watching how the service has evolved, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. The service itself is a way to not feel like you constantly have to check your email when you’re away from your desk, since it will check it for you, and filter out the important ones. If you, like me agree with Google’s Matt Cutt reference to email; some wise people have referred to it as a “to-do list that anyone can add to.” This app is like an email personal assistant to help with email woes! You can tell it which people from your contacts you want to always get messages from, and it will just send you those, as well as give you a custom signature link to put in your out of office email auto response, directing people who need immediate help how to get hold of you. You can choose the message people who go that route will get, as well as set up the form with the type of information you want to collect from them so you can determine if it’s really something you need to handle right now, or if it can wait. Flagged messages show up in your notification window for easy access.
To this point, the service was most useful when you set it up to send you a text message for those people who were designated important, or who filled out the form, hit your inbox. Now, the company has come out with the app versions, so you can choose to check that or get notifications that way instead of via text.
As far as the Android client goes, it does exactly what it says. It allows you to connect with your AwayFind inbox, and set up the notifications you want to receive, as well as check your inbox to keep an eye on what the service is monitoring. It’s a solid app, but the real power here is the service behind it, rather than the app itself.
I did find that there were a few bugs in getting my accounts synced at first, but the developers were right on top of my requests, responding to email in a matter of minutes, much to my surprise. And they let me know when a new version was up a few hours later, asking me to let them know if my problems were fixed, and if not, if I could let them know so they could keep working on it. I’m willing to forgive a lot of bugs and issues, even in early versions, when the developer is that ready to offer assistance and fix problems.
If you have a free AwayFind account, you can only monitor one email address at a time, which, for me, is usually my primary work inbox. However, if you want to subscribe to a paid plan, you can monitor more than one account, as well as get access to other features. I would suggest trying it with your heaviest incoming mail box first to see how it works for you, then going from there.

Watch on Mobile
As a person who travels for business often, I find this service to be a fantastic way to keep an eye on my inbox without needing to constantly be checking my mail. For business people on the go, I would go so far as to say this is a must-have app.
You do all your account setup online, and then sign in via the app to link the two together (far more convenient than setting up via the app). The app itself is very easy to use and clean – the object is to make it quick to go in and view any important messages that have been flagged so you can decide whether or not to followup now or later, and then get back to what it is you were doing.
You’ll use this every time you are (or are not) at your desk to check email, reducing how often you need to check email, to ensure you never miss an important message thus increasing productivity.
As I said, the app is very clean, since the objective of it is to provide you with a quick way to access your information on the go and get back to what you were doing.


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